We were Fauna users for several years and invested a lot of time working with it and around it. The time travel capability was one of the stand out features for us in addition to FQL which opened some interesting capabilities. That being said for various reasons we had to transition away from it and did so by creating a FQL compatible solution on top of Postgres. It is implemented in JavaScript/TypeScript and runs in…
I've expected this to happen, but tbh i didn't expect it to take this long.
They went for a fundamentally "lock in to a startup DB that's fully proprietary so you're screwed if we go under" which is now happening.
Open source _helps a bit_, but it doesn't change that customers now have to self-manage a database. I'm guessing most of their customers are not particularly savvy at DB self-hosting.
I was a Fauna customer and also worked with them providing technical writing for their blog and docs. At one point I was even contacted by a publisher to write a book about Fauna. I don't know what happened internally but when they accepted VC money and put a new CEO it all started to go down, fast. They probably started focusing on selling to corps instead of devs which seemed illogical IMO. Corps bring more money b…
you really should scale vertically until you can't anymore. a server with two 64 core epyc CPUs and 3TB of RAM and 24 NVMe flash SSDs is going to be able to handle 99% of companies SQL DB needs.
Yep and probably more like 99.999% of companies.
But the selling point of Fauna was primarily the data distribution, no? Like GC Spanner but without having to sell and arm and a leg.
(Spanner is more affordable now but it used to cost hundreds per month to get started)
Shutting down the whole business is the loop hole leadership found to skirt around this policy.
If they were making money hand over fist, they would likely just change the policy. Or at least if somebody would acquire them. Apparently their VC investors were not seeing the hockey stick growth, so they decided to cut the losses. Taking VC money is a more risky bet than other forms of investment. If your business is profitable, but small and is growing 5-7% a year, and no acquisition is sight, most likely it's go…
Only growing 5-7% a year *after taking millions in investment.
This highlights the challenge of smaller proprietary SaaS offerings - they can shut down abruptly leaving you in the bind. It is great to see Fauna making a commitment to Open Source the project, which will be great option to have for their customers I wish they would have started with Open Source project to begin with, perhaps future would be different
> they can shut down abruptly leaving you in the bind "We understand that this is going to be a disruptive change to many and are fully committed to working with you to help you migrate off the service over the next several months."
It is 2 months to switch to a totally different database with a totally different query language. That is not easy even if you get some "help" from a company shutting down.
If they were making money hand over fist, they would likely just change the policy. Or at least if somebody would acquire them. Apparently their VC investors were not seeing the hockey stick growth, so they decided to cut the losses. Taking VC money is a more risky bet than other forms of investment. If your business is profitable, but small and is growing 5-7% a year, and no acquisition is sight, most likely it's go…
Only growing 5-7% a year *after taking millions in investment.
Exactly. It could have been a bootstrapped business possibly, maybe with traditional loans for business growth.
But if you take the rocket fuel of VC financing, you either accelerate so fast as to reach the orbit, or you crash back to earth. There's no glider option then.
We were Fauna users for several years and invested a lot of time working with it and around it. The time travel capability was one of the stand out features for us in addition to FQL which opened some interesting capabilities. That being said for various reasons we had to transition away from it and did so by creating a FQL compatible solution on top of Postgres. It is implemented in JavaScript/TypeScript and runs in…
Update: I created a placeholder repo on Github with some more information on what is currently supported. Please engage if this could help anyone https://github.com/eigilsagafos/fauna-postgres/issues/1
Even mongo only got a lot of people excited because they had hot girls on the stalls in the conferences. That i think was a master stroke in marketing to nerds. of course later on they improved the product as well, but initially it was a buggy mess and should not have survived the first few years.
The one constant in my career has been mongoDB -- specifically, projects to replace it with a relational database after a deployment had failed to deliver any of the expected benefits, and introduced unforeseen downsides that had become untenable. Mongo has literally never come up in any context for me where it wasn't either already, or eventually, slated for retirement. I absolutely don't doubt a document store incl…
The reason to change is scale. If your Postgres spend is in the six digits a month range, JSONB is probably very painful for you. It does not perform very well. Additionally, you've probably spent a good amount of engineering time painstakingly sharding your database at the application level and hoping you've done it correctly. MongoDB solves these problems out of the box, among others. I have run both of these above 1M a month in spend and I would certainly choose MongoDB for this over Postgres. If you plan on never spending a lot on your database, I do like Postgres a lot, still.
I was a Fauna customer and also worked with them providing technical writing for their blog and docs. At one point I was even contacted by a publisher to write a book about Fauna. I don't know what happened internally but when they accepted VC money and put a new CEO it all started to go down, fast. They probably started focusing on selling to corps instead of devs which seemed illogical IMO. Corps bring more money b…
you really should scale vertically until you can't anymore. a server with two 64 core epyc CPUs and 3TB of RAM and 24 NVMe flash SSDs is going to be able to handle 99% of companies SQL DB needs.
I mostly agree with you, but a single server won’t solve redundancy and disaster recovery. That doesn’t mean you need to adopt a fully distributed system – a read replica or even periodic backup should be sufficient – but it’s not as simple as “just use a single server.”
Stackoverflow is famously powered by a cluster of three vertically scaled database servers.
> they can shut down abruptly leaving you in the bind "We understand that this is going to be a disruptive change to many and are fully committed to working with you to help you migrate off the service over the next several months."
It is 2 months to switch to a totally different database with a totally different query language. That is not easy even if you get some "help" from a company shutting down.